“Will you promise to tell me you’d rather be alone if that is how you honestly feel?” she burst out, almost as soon as she had closed the door behind her. She bit her lip, before rushing on, “Jack tells me that I have no tact at all, and that I talk far too much, but I know how I would feel in your place, and I—we were all
so fond of Uncle Guy, you know! I just think it’s so terribly sad and tragic that you didn’t get to know him. He was a wonderful person. So quiet that people wouldn’t notice him unless he wanted them to, and yet he cared about people! I remember that he came all the way to Boston to see us after my papa died, and he took me out to dinner and to the opera, and that was how I met Jack…”
She clapped her hand suddenly over her mouth, a dismayed look appearing in her eyes. “Oh, heavens, there I go again! I do keep rattling on, don’t I? And I really came up to see if you wanted to talk.”
It was impossible not to like Corinne, although I had never been close to other females of my own age. She openly admitted that she loved to gossip, but there was no guile in her, and she had a habit of saying exactly what she thought, even though it often proved embarrassing later.
I suppose I needed a friend during the weeks that followed. I had never had one before, and although Corinne and I were complete opposites as far as personalities went, we complemented each other in a way; and she had a quick, intelligent mind, for all her madcap ways. Certainly it was Corinne who helped me most during those first difficult days, when I had to adjust to the fact that I had lost my father before I found him again, and that now I was really alone, with no one but myself to depend on.
I was rich, of course, and that would help. And I was no longer naive, for Edgar Cardon had seen to that. It did not shock me, therefore, when Corinne proceeded to drag out what she laughingly referred to as the family skeletons.
“Well, of course someone has to tell you,” she pointed out reasonably, “and Aunt Katherine never would! So it had better be me. Even Jack agrees with me that you should be prepared for what you’ll find when you go to New Mexico.”
“Good heavens, you make it all sound alarming!” I teased her, but she insisted, for once, that she would be serious.
“For instance,” she said dramatically, perching herself on the end of my bed, “how much have you been told about Todd Shannon?”
I admitted that I knew only that he had been my father’s partner, who owned a joint interest in the vast SD Ranch.
“Just as I thought!” Corinne pursed her lips in an unusual expression of gravity. “And of course he’s Aunt Katherine’s brother-in-law, although I’m sure she never became too friendly with him, even while Uncle James was alive. You see, my Uncle James had come to America many years before his brother Todd turned up suddenly. He was a serious young man, who had been given an education, and while he studied law here in Boston he went to work for my grandfather, who was Aunt Katherine’s papa, of course, and…” Here Corinne stopped to draw in a long breath, and catching my slight smile grinned mischievously back at me. “I know what you’re thinking! They say that all of us Bostonians are related in some way, and I don’t doubt that it’s true! But Rowena, you must listen to me, for I’m trying to be serious for a change. What was I saying?”
“You were going to tell me something about this man Todd Shannon,” I said helpfully, and she nodded her head sagely.
“Yes, of course! Well, it was rather embarrassing for my poor aunt and uncle when he turned up in Boston, for he’d been a kind of black sheep, you know! They said that as young as he was he had been mixed up in some kind of revolutionary activities in Ireland. They’re always fighting the British, are they not? Well, anyhow, he had to leave in a hurry, so he came here.”
“Is that how he met my father?” I asked curiously, and Corinne gave a small shrug.
“I’m not sure, for it was all before my time, of course. But I think I remember hearing someone mention that they had met on the ship coming over here, and decided to seek their fortune together. It sounds very romantic and exciting, doesn’t it? They went west together, for in those days the frontiers were still expanding, and it was before the war with Mexico. The Spaniards still owned most of the Southwest, and California as well.”
I had made a point of studying American history, so that I nodded, and Corinne, with one of her quick flashes of intuition, seemed to understand that I was becoming impatient for her to come to the point of her recital.
“Oh dear!” she said ruefully, “there I go again. Rambling! You don’t want to hear about history, but about Todd Shannon—and your father, of course, for he played a large part in what happened as well.” She giggled suddenly. “How I loved to listen to the grown-ups talk when I was a child! I would stay very quiet, and pretend to be reading, or busy with my embroidery. But you know, to me, the whole story was quite fascinating, and more exciting, than anything I had read in a book.”
“Go on,” I said. “Now you have me quite fascinated. What happened?”
“Well, as I was saying, your father and Uncle Todd—I’m supposed to call him that, but somehow he always frightened me a little bit—went west and they had all kinds of adventures; sometimes together and sometimes not, for they were both very independent men. But then, just before the war with Mexico, Uncle Todd fell in love. They said she was very beautiful, a young Spanish girl of good family, who was under the guardianship of her brother. She had been meant for a convent, but instead she met Uncle Todd and fell in love with him too. They eloped, ran away to Texas, and left her brother vowing vengeance. There!” Corinne looked at me triumphantly. “Now isn’t that an exciting and romantic tale so far?”
“Isn’t there more?” I asked pointedly.
“Oh, Rowena! Sometimes, I vow you prefer tragedy to romance! Well, there is one involved here. You see, after the Mexicans were forced to cede their lands in the Southwest to the United States, Todd Shannon brought his bride back to New Mexico, and filed claim to her family’s lands.”
I frowned. “But what of that revengeful brother of hers?”
“Alejandro Kordes? Oh, he had been one of the few hotheads who refused to acknowledge their new American government. They say he took off into the mountains along with some others like him—and later on there were rumors that he had joined up with a band of comancheros. At least, that’s what they call themselves, but I’ve heard Uncle Todd say that they’re nothing but a crew of renegade cutthroats who trade with the Indians and sell them guns to use against the white men. Alejandro had become an outlaw, but he still hated Todd Shannon.”
Once she got down to it, Corinne proved a good storyteller, with a gift for evoking atmosphere, so that it was easy for me to picture the terrible, tragic events that had led to a family feud that, Corinne warned me, was still in existence. At the time, it was my father’s part in those events that intrigued me the most.
He had made some money in the gold fields of California, and when his old partner had written to say he needed capital, he had traveled to New Mexico. He and Todd Shannon had become partners again, in an enormous cattle ranch they called the SD—Shannon-Dangerfield. They had been prospering when tragedy struck.
“It was the time of the great silver rush in that part of the world, and Uncle Todd and your father went prospecting together. Alma, Todd Shannon’s wife, had given birth to a son, and had not regained her strength, so they had left her behind with a young cousin of Alma’s who had suddenly appeared on the scene, confessing she had run away from the Apache Indians. Elena, her name was, and she was the result of union between a captured Spanish girl, Alma’s aunt, and her captor, an Apache chieftain. Although she was half Apache, Elena had said she had been intrigued by her mother’s tales of ‘civilization,’ and wanted to live as a white woman, not as an Indian squaw.”
“Elena?”
The name struck a chord in my memory. I heard it again, repeated in my mother’s spiteful voice.
“Elena! Sometimes he called the name in his sleep. And you were called Rowena Elaine.”
“Corinne—what was she like? Did anyone ever describe her?”